Thesis Topic and Title Proposal

Optimizing Job Assignment for Single Machine Operation at GM PAPERWISE Manufacturing Co.

A Strategy to Cope with Emergent Demand.

GM Papwerwise Manufacturing Co. is a Manufacturer of paper bags or “supot” with different sizes. The Company started 5 years ago with the city of lipa as the only market offering their product to known grocery stores in and establishment. However with the emerging demands of paper bags due to the implementation of city ordinance regarding prohibition on the use of plastic bag not only in lipa but with other cities and municipality in batangas, also national capital region and other nearby provinces, how to cope with the demands starts to be the problem.

Operating under a single paper bag making machine (cost 7 million, procured 5 years ago),the owner thins of procuring another one but by internal investigation conducted by them it is not feasible to do so. With a single machine, problem arrives when a customer or dealer orders large quantity but with different sizes. The machine can produce different sizes however this incurred cost whenever they are setting up to machine to run and produce a single size. It takes them almost a day to configure the machine. A scenario the machine is currently producing size 50cm. but a customer suddenly orders size 40cm, the owner has a hard time to produce that order if they don’t have enough safety stock for that size. The owner said commonly they have no choice but to outsource the order loosing revenue.

Propose solution would be finding an optimal job assignment given that the company has only one machine. A linear programming approach focusing on allocation scheduling problem analysis will be use in order cope with the demand.